Emily Siner

It's all about building up your arsenal of go-to recipes that are flexible enough to use up just about anything.

Margaret calls them hero recipes.

So one of Margaret's hero recipes is an anything goes savory bread pudding.

You throw all that leftover bread into a freezer bag.

These hero recipes do rely on some advanced planning.

You need to make sure you're stocked up on staples.

Aromatics like onion and garlic are essential to building flavor.

Margaret always has puff pastry in her freezer, which she uses to repurpose leftovers into a savory galette.

And she always has shelf-stable essentials like rice and pasta in her cupboard.

Or, Tamar says, the even easier version of this is just to cook an egg and put it on top.

It has the effect of making almost everything feel hardier and fancier.

Whatever you make with the staples, you can set yourself up for success by making sure you cook enough to produce leftovers.

Tamar also recommends thinking about what you're going to do with all the leftovers before you put them away in your fridge.

For example, she might chop up the ends of the parsley she used for dinner and put them on some leftover pasta and then put it in the fridge already combined.

Now the next meal is halfway started.

Or at the very least, she labels the leftovers with their intended use.

This brings us to takeaway two, which is a very practical one.

It's a method that chefs use in restaurants, Margaret says, but it's equally applicable in your home.

And this becomes even more important when you store food in your freezer.

Using the freezer is a whole art in itself.